A dual-band Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) camera employs two different sets of sensing elements to detect infrared radiation. The two types of sensors include a long-wave infrared (LW or LWIR, wavelength 8-12 μm) sensor and a mid-wave infrared (MW or MWIR, wavelength 3-5 μm) sensor. LW images from data generated by the LW sensor are based on emitted energy, while the MW images from data generated by the MW sensor are based on emitted energy plus reflected energy, where reflected energy is prevalent in the daytime. Similar but slightly different monochrome images (the LW image and the MW image) can be constructed from data generated by each of the sensors. However, human viewers may have difficulty combining the two images in their minds to create a combined representation of the two monochrome images that accounts for different phenomenological features that may be embedded within the two bands.
The LW image and the MW image can be combined into a single image with each pixel having a vector of size two (represented as {LW, MW}). A human can perceive phenomenological features in the combined image mapped to two channels of a color display better than in two separate grayscale images. Even more of the phenomenology is perceivable when features of the combined image are displayed in full visual color, using all three channels (e.g., red channel, green channel, and blue channel) of a color display. Typically, the human visual system can directly perceive images within the visible spectrum, which includes three partially overlapping bands: the red band (R), the green band (G) and the blue band (B), such that each pixel of a visible image is a vector of length three {R, G, B}.